Learning as I age

Month: February 2017

What does Blithe mean ? Perhaps it means happy. Remember the old rhyme ?

And the child that is born on the Sabbath Day- is Bonnie, blithe and good and gay. Lucy Melinda from purpleslobinrecovery has nominated me for another award. Thank you Lucy. ,Mine is not an award free blog. I get nominated very rarely for awards and right now, I am in the period where I enjoy reading others blogs than writing my own. So thanks to Lucy, I am back to writing again.

What is The Blog-aholic Award?
“The Blog-aholic Award” is an award for bloggers addicted to blogging with creative, ingenious and inspiring posts. They mesmerize their followers with their posts, keep them captivated and riveted to their blog. The Blog-aholic Award is also for bloggers who “Share and Inspire Others!” The Recipe Hunter (Cook & Enjoy). This award was created by Esme Slabbert.

Rules
Put the above award logo/image on your blog.
List the rules .Thank the blogger who nominated you and provide a link to their blog (it can be to the post in which they nominated you or any other post or you can even link to their “About” page).
Mention the creator, Esme, of this award and please provide a link or pingback as I [Esmé of The Recipe Hunter (Cook & Enjoy) ] would love to meet you!
Write a post to show your award.
Share a link to your best post(s).

I used to have a good smile ( so I have been told) but I lost it maybe around the age of 18, when life and its realities started hitting me. I am now 47 and am trying hard to bring that smile back to my face.

I am a medical doctor but strange for a doctor, I have a very strong interest in history, English literature, reading and writing fiction and my preferred books for reading are not my medical books but books which show old time values.

My favorite color is red- why do I love red ? Because I think this color reflects who I am and my personality- vibrant( like to be), down to earth, simple, homely but likes to look good but too lazy and not confident enough to put in the effort to make myself look good.

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This last week has been a busy one- we had a proposal deadline to meet and the review process took days off our schedule. We even worked last weekend.

One of my blog friends called me from her Tour of the Holy Land. It was the highlight of my day, the first time she called. I never expected her to call me, when she was traveling. I never even knew she was traveling, though I had been wondering why she had been absent from the blog world for a time – then, I knew. I am hoping to read her memoirs here.

We got all the proposals in today. I have not been at my desk at work for the past two days. I was attending a PRIM& R training for research ethics. In spite of the difficult work schedule, my very kind supervisor spared me from work. I got to meet people from my old work place, those I had been not wanting to meet so much too. We did some catching up.

Three and a half years is not a short time. Much has changed. Though water has flown down the bridge, it was not much. Time seems to have stood still over my old department. Many of the colleagues who were with me are no longer there. It used to give me pleasure to watch how retribution caught up one after the other of my colleagues, that gave me plenty of trouble days while I worked there. Today I found out that I did not really care anymore. I moved out of that workplace so they could have a free run of the place and do it free of any hindrance. But it seems that too much of a good thing was not so good. I tried to forgive them and prayed for them for sometime , especially when I was unemployed and had lost about a year and a half of work time from my CV because of my premature resignation. But now that I am with a lot of good friends in my new work place and I have come to terms with the changes in my life and come to appreciate and thank God for every thing, small and big, good or bad( what I think is bad) and maybe that has brought me healing.

Catching up seemed to bring realization to me that when I heard of things that happened to my old colleagues, those things didn’t bring me pleasure any more.

Perhaps I have healed after all.

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We had unseasonal rains today. It is the weekend and it was raining. Over the last 6 days or so, we have had bits of rain but today was like the absolute, ultimate in rain. Why am I waxing eloquent on rain ? We get less than one day of rain per year in the desert and this year, it is an unexpected bonanza. The rain didn’t bring down the temperature much, so it was pleasantly comfortable.

So comfortable in fact, that my daughter wanted me to get her lentil soup from Shakespeare. I was hesitant to go out in the rain, so I asked her if homemade lentil soup would do and she said yes, if I let her make gluten free brownies for dessert after. I said ok.

Hana, one of my colleagues had a few months back sent me a recipe for an Arabic Shorma, she called it, which is tasty lentil soup.

A big pot of hot lentil soup for less than half a cup of lentils- very good value indeed. In Shakespeare, we would have had to pay at least 12 $ for a bowl of soup. The soup was as tasty as the one from the shop. We each had two bowls each and didn’t want any main course for dinner, not that there was any.:)

It was just starters and dessert. The brownies got a trifle burnt and the daughter was a little disappointed but I was pleased as I could not eat even a bit of it.

Here are the rules:
Thank the blogger who nominated you and provide a link to their blog. (Done)

Write a post to show your award.( Here it is)

Give a brief story of how your blog started.

In 2014, when I was 45, I started writing. I had no income. No, I was not starving or homeless but just didn’t have money to call my own. I had spent every penny of my end of service benefit and so was dependent on my husband for money. I was ok with it to tell you the truth but I am extravagant by nature and his allowance would not cover my extra expenses. I decided to take up writing to make an income. Most sites I visited required me to have a blog and provide a link to a blog. At first I desisted but finally gave in and in August 2014, I started writing a blog. It has brought me a lot of friends, some of whom I talk to on the telephone too, and am enjoying blogging thoroughly.

Give two pieces of advice to new bloggers.

1. Blogging opens you up to yourself before it opens you to the world outside. Be honest and the world will see your honesty.

2. Every human being has problems, issues, trouble spots. If you write about your own or read those of others, you will understand that the world is a much smaller place than you can even imagine.

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I often wonder how falling in love might have been because for me that experience has never happened. The music playing in the background, the flowers, the courting, the songs, the looking into each other’s eyes in their depths and fathoming the degree of love he had for me- nope- I have never felt it.

I am married for 25 years to the same man- this year is our 25th wedding anniversary. I had an arranged marriage and over the years I have gradually grown to love the man. When I talk about my arranged marriage to my colleagues, they give me looks like how is this possible. Can they really be in love ? Are they just pretending ? Can two people who are so un-like even live together for 25 years ?

But it has happened. I must confess, many are the times I have wanted to run away from this marriage or to call it quits. The only reason we are together to this day is my husband and his unwavering faith in our marriage and his love.

For he has had that magical experience of falling in love. He says he fell in love with me about 5 years before I knew even he existed. He studied in my college and was an intern when I was a first year medical student of 17. He might have been about 24 years when he saw me first- I cannot remember this incident but he gave me a tuberculin test as part of a research project ( not a very romantic setting, I know) but he says he fell in love with me, the minute I asked him, What are you doing this for?”

Years passed-the year was 1989- I was a year 4 medical student and one day a curly haired post graduate student hailed me as I was walking past the emergency department of our hospital. He had met his cousin during his vacation who happened to be married to one of my relatives. That cousin of his mentioned that she had met me during the summer too. And he thought that some sort of marriage proposal was going on. He tells me later that he doesn’t know what made him impulsive enough to call out to me that day. I said hello and we talked for a few seconds and then he says, well, what do you think ? I said, About what ?” ( I had no idea what he was talking about).

Then he says, ” About our marriage- are you willing to get married to me ?”

Taken entirely by surprise, I said, ” Who do you think you are and what do I know about you that I can say anything to you ?” I was mortified that someone would dare assume that I was available when I was still a student. Embarrassed he went away.

And again years passed. We tried our best to avoid meeting each other and avoided one another’s units in hospital- this was more or less successful for I saw him less than two times over the next two years.

In 1992, after I passed out and got home to work as a doctor, my father went to meet his family for an official engagement. During that time, he happened to find out that this family was the same family to which the guy who had proposed me two years back belonged. He came back home and told my mum and me about them. I wanted to get out of the deal as soon as I heard about this considering our past history but as fate would have it, everything worked out in his favor because my father liked him a lot. We got married to the greatest surprise of a lot of people, myself included.

February seems a good month to remember old tales and how we got together- more than love, if you ask me, what holds us together is the fact that we can’t imagine a life without one another- I guess we need each other to survive. Is that love, I am not sure but I still do not hear music nor do I get flowers or candies on Valentine’s day but there is a glue that is stronger than all that stuff that holds us together and that I think is ample evidence of the dictum that “marriages and love are made in heaven”.